Email Marketing

Email marketing offers one of the highest return on investments possible with the ability to market to your subscribers ongoing, for next to nothing after the initial cost and effort to get them. Once you’ve built an effective email marketing strategy however what more can you do? Well, one way you can take your email marketing to the next level and utilise the database of prospects you’ve painstakingly built is through CRM Remarketing which is now possible on three of the biggest advertising networks – Google, Facebook and Twitter. Continue Reading →

Email is an essential element in any online marketing strategy with its low ongoing costs and impressive ROI. With so many different email and CRM platforms out there it can be hard to work out what is best for your business. Here is an Infographic I have prepared that quickly and easily breaks down three of the top platforms and how they compare.

If you have an eCommerce or transactional website which sells online you will no doubt be using email marketing to drive sales. One email technique which you probably aren’t taking advantage of is Browse Abandonment Emails. A lot of case studies have shown great success with this form of email, such as Silverpop’s client SmartPak Equine who generated a 37.6% open rate, 7.4% click-through rate and 44 cents revenue per email sent (compared to $4.80 RPES for their cart abandonment emails).

In 1978 Gary Thuerk dubbed the ‘Father of Spam’ sent a message promoting DEC machines (an early computer system) to 394 recipients which resulted in many sales and the start of email marketing as we know it. Since then, it has come a long way and forms the back bone of many successful online marketing strategies.

The biggest benefit of email marketing is ownership of your subscribers which allows you to continue marketing to them at a very low cost. However, building subscribers in the first place is hard. People are more hesitant than ever to put their email address into a form and there are many companies vying for attention. Buying lists are a no-go both legally and in the results they generate, so what do you do?

Email Marketing has been around almost as long as the internet, and the reason that it has stood the test of time is purely down to performance. Email continues to deliver a high ROI for the marketing spend required and is relied on by hundreds of thousands of companies around the world to generate leads and sales. There is still a big difference between ‘successful’ email marketing and ‘really successful’ email marketing and that difference boils down to one thing – testing.

Email Marketing Glossary

• Bounce Rate - the percentage of emails that have been sent but which can not be delivered for various reasons.• Cost Per Thousand - usually abbreviated to CPM it is the rate that email marketing databases are rented for, ie. if you want to send an email to another companies database of 10,000 people at $18CPM this will cost $180.• Click Through Rate - usually abbreviated to CTR this is the percentage of people that clicked a link in an email that was opened. ie. if an email was opened 8,000 times which generates 160 clicks the CTR would be 2%.• Double Opt-In - the recommended but arguably lower performing method of adding people to your email marketing database. For subscribers to be successfully added they must confirm their email address by cicking a link that is emailed to them.• Hard Bounce - an email that has failed to be delivered due to a permanent reason such as an incorrect email address.

• Open Rate - the percentage of emails that have been opened as compared to the number sent. ie. if 10,000 emails were sent and only 3,000 opened the open rate would be 30%.• Segmentation - the filtering of an email marketing database into highly targeted subscriber segments so that more relevant email campaigns can be sent.• Single Opt-In - a way of building an email marketing database without the need for them to confirm their email addreses. This technique does open the opportunity of spam complaints and is not allowed with most major email marketing providers.• Soft Bounce - an email which has been sent but cannot be delivered for a temporary reason such as the recipients email inbox is full.• Spam - email which is sent to someone who have not given permission to be emailed and who did not request it.